CHARLOTTE Local Charlotte News — The Mecklenburg County Board of Elections Office is opening up seven more polling sites starting Thursday morning. The additional sites will be located in each of the seven towns having their local elections: Cornelius, Davidson, Huntersville, Matthews, Mint Hill, Pineville, and Stallings.
Mecklenburg County’s first early voting site was at the Board of Elections office in Uptown and only saw seven voters over the last five days. Michael Dickerson, Director of Mecklenburg County Elections, said that is mostly due to the location of their office.
“It probably makes no sense to drive down to my office from Cornelius, or drive up here from Pineville, unless you’re up here working, ” Dickerson said.
Dickerson also said the fact that Charlotte’s municipal elections being delayed has contributed to some confusion.
“This is the only time I’ve ever had just a smaller town election. Usually, this would be with the City of Charlotte election. So yeah you would have had the smaller numbers for the Matthews, Mint Hill. and all the other smaller towns but you would have larger numbers because the City of Charlotte was also running or the school board was running, and that’s not on your ballot this year,” Dickerson explained.
Though in-person voting has been limited in Mecklenburg County thus far, they have processed 47 absentee ballots.
Gerry Cohen, who sits on the Wake County Board of Elections, said in years with no state or national elections, there tends to be less voter turnout.
“There’s less publicity, there’s less campaign spending, you know, it doesn’t reach people’s thresholds, there’s less early voting sites,” Cohen said.
